Jai Paul

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As of this writing, 673 people have signed an online petition imploring Jai Paul's label, XL Recordings, to release his debut album. "The 'leak' was seriously the best album of this year," insists the petitioner, referring to 16 demos that unceremoniously surfaced on Bandcamp in April only to be swiftly removed and denounced by both Paul and XL amidst rumors of a stolen laptop. Though the notoriously painstaking London artist—who works with his bassist and brother Anup—has only released two singles over the course of the last two and a half years, the global breadth of the petition’s signees suggests a wide reach, including fans in France, Korea, Colombia, and New Jersey. This cosmopolitan base matches the music that makes up this not-album, from its samples of both traditional Indian music to snatches of "Gossip Girl" dialogue, from its Princely guitar solos to all those half-drunk beats that wear their Dilla love with pride. Unfortunately, even if the petition hits 10,000 signatures, it probably won't change much. Indeed, by all accounts, XL would like to see a proper Jai Paul album most.

Even considering the surrounding controversy, these tracks give us insight into an artist who doesn't seem like a machiavellian internet hype-master as much as a doubter, a tinkerer, an idealist. In his only interview thus far, from 2011, he said, "Music to me was just a hobby and, in a way, I didn't care about showing it to anyone." And that internal struggle—so elusive in our show me, show me, show me social media world—plays out in these songs, where he sings, perhaps prophetically, "In the company of thieves/ Will I stay or will I leave?/ Will they steal away my life?/ Will I go down without my fight?/ I might." Paradoxically, Paul's apparent ambivalence toward a music industry that's desperate to support him has only stirred the fervor of those willing to drop £7 on a shady looking Bandcamp page. When he's ready, we will be, too; if he's not, at least we've got something. —Ryan Dombal

Doris

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When Earl raps, he gazes far off into the distance, so cosmically bored is he by our interest. Watch him on “Sway in the Morning,” at god knows what hour, slumped in front of a fluorescent-lit table: This freestyle is an industry rite of passage, and yet this one is different, precisely because Earl is there, and everyone, in that moment, exists to please him. Sway plays beat after beat; Earl, with the contemptuous purity of a teenager, waves each one away. "What would you prefer?" Sway asks courteously, his industry-vet eyes narrowing with the effort of getting inside Earl's head. When he drops "Drop It Like It's Hot (Remix)", a grin cracks Earl's face; his head bops goofily. The physical relief that washes over Sway's body, as he leans back, is palpable.

This is the relationship Earl has to the world: We want, more than anything, to hear him rap. We will stand and wait expectantly for minutes, years. Frankly, it's awkward, maybe even a little pathetic. Being a functioning teenager, he doesn't exactly relish handing expectant adults what they're waiting for, and thus the first voice we hear on Doris belongs, hilariously, to Frank Ocean's cousin.

This ambivalence is the dance of Doris, the story of Earl Sweatshirt: How do you do what you want when strangers seem to want it even more badly than you do? "Don't nobody care about how you feel," Vince Staples teases on the intro to "Burgundy". "We want raps." Sooner or later, he's going to have to give up the goods. So he sighs, leans in, opens his mouth.

The second he does, our anticipation justifies itself. Quite simply, there hasn't been a more viscerally enjoyable and economical rapper working in years. Earl's POV leaps from the front seat of a car into the sky in a single line ("Ride dirty as the fucking sky that you praying to"); family communications break down into a series of sound effects ("Mama often was offering peace offerings/ Think, wheeze, cough, scoff, and then he's off again"); Earl sprouts a ballooning gut and morphs into a fattened hedonist (You know me, drugs out front the telly/ I'm couch-drunk, ready to fuck/ Count 'fetti and bucks/ Count loud as I slap loud cross the belly"). Try wrestling free of the line "hard as armed services/ y'all might'a heard of him" once he utters it.

But Earl's heart is in here, too—his father, his mother; that fabled camp for troubled teens, being outed by Complex; girls, fame, puppy love, being true to yourself. "Breaking news that's less important when the Lakers lose/ There's lead in that baby food," he deadpans on "Hive". He can tell you are a little dumb, maybe. But he'll oblige, eventually. He even assented to Sway at last, unleashing a verse so devastating that Sway nearly doubled over when it was finished. Earl's verdict? "That was butt." —Jayson Greene

The Electric Lady

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Early on, Janelle Monáe rarely exhibited doubt or vulnerability, not only because she is a bona fide Icon, but also because there has always been another, important correlative to her vibrant self-expression: like any science fiction author, she uses her medium to explore deeply rooted social ills and present an alternative vision of how the revolution might look. Her first EP and LP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) and The ArchAndroid, were vast in scope, and the futuristic dystopian epic they told—that of Cindi Maywether, a cyborg fugitive hunted for the crime of falling in love with a human—was an entertaining but tightly packed narrative. Monáe, while adept and self-assured, had some difficulty getting her work to resonate with an audience not already receptive to concepts like "identity politics" or "Afropunk."

With The Electric Lady, the masterful, guest-packed double album she's called a prequel to ArchAndroid, Monáe hit her stride. The record is still fearless and luxurious, but now it's accessible, too; songs like "Dance Apocalyptic" and Miguel duet "Primetime" still resonate without metaphorical context, but the narrative is there if you want it. The powers of "Q.U.E.E.N." ("Are we a lost generation of our people?/ Add us to equations but they'll never make us equal") and "Ghetto Woman" (a paean to her mother's uphill battle) are self-evident. Nearly every track pulls its own weight, both individually and in the context of a larger work about inequality and spiritual rebellion. Her Electric Lady isn't a robot, she's an evolved life form. That distinction turned a highly sophisticated, empirically likable work into an organic classic—one that lets people in. —Devon Maloney

Days Are Gone

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It's all there in Este Haim's bass face. It really is. When so many rock bands—you know, those things with guitars and drums and hooks you can remember—can seem hopelessly self-defeating, shamed, bored, or worse, Haim make no apologies. They're excited about their own songs enough to look like shocked tiger cubs taking their first swim while playing them. This enthusiasm is contagious, and it's why these three sisters from L.A.'s San Fernando Valley are responsible for the most appealing pop-rock record since Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

Days Are Gone chronicles the mistakes, triumphs, and confusions our hearts go through as we navigate our 20s, with Este, 27, Danielle, 24, and Alana, 22, bridging the gap between young-adult and adult-adult. Their harmonies and vacuum-packed arrangements put forth a unified front as they try to escape dependency on "Let Me Go" (replete with a wriggling guitar solo) or snub-out some lying son of a bitch on "My Song 5" as a snap beat gives their middle fingers some extra swagger. The hot emotions are tempered with contemplation, vulnerability; "Go Slow" simmers with an ache reminiscent of Kate Bush—another performer who's never been afraid to show her feelings on her face. Meanwhile, the shaggy "Honey & I" gloriously splits the difference between those twentysomething Sundays when all you want to do is sleep and the Fridays when you can't close your eyes. "Love wasn't what I thought it once was," sings Danielle, looking past teen dreams with her head high, "I'm not afraid no more." And just as the track seems poised for an ecstatic conclusion, it dials back cautiously. This is growing up. —Ryan Dombal

Dream River

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Twenty-three years on, Bill Callahan somehow found a way to whittle down his craft yet again. That in and of itself would be a feat on this remarkable run, spanning from his last album as Smog, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, and reaching to what might be an apex or else a stunning vantage point here. After the questing/questioning of 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle and the arid landscapes of 2011’s Apocalypse, two albums stripped yet full of open-spaces and silences, what was left to pare down?

What distinguishes Dream River from his previous albums is nearly imperceptible. Callahan still uses the percussion of Brian Beattie, the arcing timbre of flautist of Beth Galiger, and the Cheshire Cat-like psychedelic guitar of Matt Kinsey. Callahan’s cinematographer’s (or is it a cartographer’s?) eye remains sharp; he still sings of eagles and wildlife, the contours of rivers, the pinging of winds, in much the same way that an Edu-period haikuist might perceive an interior state by gazing upon the outer world. Though did Bashō ever write about the taste of pilgrim guts?

Throughout Dream River, the dominant image is of a parabola: the trajectories of javelins and arrows, of gulls and buzzards in flight and landing, the easeful touchdown of small planes, of love itself. And, arching over it all, the movement of time’s arrow. No matter the heights achieved, one must always plummet back down. But when Callahan sings, “Time itself means nothing/ But time spent with you,” there’s a sense of love within. “I always went wrong in the same place/ where the river splits towards the sea,” he sings on the song that serves as the album’s heart, “Small Plane”, finally realizing that he could instead merge into something larger. Callahan has long been indie music’s itinerant musician, but for the first time in his music, there’s also a sense of home. —Andy Beta

Night Time, My Time

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Let's get one thing straight from the start: that image over there on the left is not supposed to turn you on, it's supposed to make you feel gross. Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time is emboldened by the power to make you feel icky, constantly balling up our cultural obsessions with voyeurism and confession and live-tweeted female breakdowns only to hock them back in our faces like poison spitballs. "It ain't your right," she sneers early on overtop a tarnished, motorik beat, and you almost get the feeling that she's talking about our right to be listening in on such intimate declarations at all. A minute later, through a clenched jaw: "I'll only warn you one time/ I've got a stilted view." It's not just empty provocation. This record is not polite, this record does not wait for permission; reality show casting directors take note because this recorddid not come here to make friends.

Night Time, My Time is blown-speaker, smeared-lipstick pop—would-be radio hits with that last topcoat of paint left incomplete. It's a little bit retro—"Omanko" is jet-lagged Suicide; "I Will" is Blondie with overgrown roots; "24 Hours" is a song I am bummed John Hughes did not get to hear before he died—but its overall sensibility is undeniably 2013. The unfinished-basement textures are the work of Producer of the Moment/Most Valuable Ex-Hippos Member Ariel Reichstadt, and if it had a kindred spirit in the many things he had a hand in this year it was Charli XCX's True Romance—another record that seethed and blushed and oh-my-God-ed and just felt at all times unapologetically alive. But Night Time, My Time gave us the added bonus of long-delayed gratification: a brave and uncompromising artist who'd languished so long in the dentist office waiting room of the music industry finally hears her name called—and finally gets a chance to bare her fangs. "The way I was before, I'm not her anymore," Ferreira surges on "Heavy Metal Heart", flinging off each syllable with wild abandon, like she's shaking off the last scales of old skin. —Lindsay Zoladz

Shaking the Habitual

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Of all the ways The Knife have provoked audiences over the years—trading in sprightly synth-pop for dread-ridden electro-goth, crafting impenetrable found-sound operas about Charles Darwin, turning up at awards shows inattire that puts Björk to shame—words have never been their weapon of choice. But on Shaking the Habitual, words are what matter most. Even as it pushes the Swedish duo to uncompromising extremes (this album doesn’t so much clear the dancefloor as tear a fissure right through it), the album stands as the Knife’s most humane, compassionate work to date. It’s a concept album but, instead of thrusting its narrative upon you, it asks that you take control of your own. Throughout the 96-minute record, Karin Dreijer Andersson can be heard talking about “stories” the way Gollum talks about rings—as a precious and empowering life-source. For Karin and brother Olaf Dreijer, stories are the building blocks of history as it is told—and, conversely, the instrument through which centuries-old socio-economic power structures can be dismantled.

Of course, the Knife recognize that’s a tall order for any single album, so they dutifully lead by example, bulldozing their ice-sculpted sound and reshaping it into percussive belly-dancer thrusts, extended sound-collaged drones, and hot-wired techno. But the clamor ultimately works in service to a clarity of vision, a philosophical throughline that connects the Knife to a roll call of radicals ranging from Margaret Atwood and Judith Butler to Fugazi and Salt-n-Pepa. Quoting the latter, Olaf sings, “let’s talk about gender, baby, let’s talk about you and me,” just as the nine-minute electro-punk gut-puncher “Full of Fire” comes to a sudden halt. Here, such jarring gestures signal not the end of the story, but your cue to start telling yours. —Stuart Berman

Wakin on a Pretty Daze

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Kurt Vile gets a lot of ink for being a supremely chill, modest family man, so what could possibly inspire him to say something like, “in this day and age, ‘punk ideals’ are totally irrelevant”? Specifically, punk idealists who took issue with his decision to license a year-old song to Bank of America, a windfall that required no work whatsoever and allowed him to support his wife and buy better diapers for his daughter. Did Patrick Stickles not get the joke on “Puppet to the Man”? But in a more general sense, it’s a realization that gets described more tactfully throughout Vile’s masterful fourth LP, the lightbulb moment when all those old designs for life, including your own, just don’t apply to reality anymore.

None of these revelations come quickly during Wakin' on a Pretty Daze: On the opening quasi-title track, Vile rouses himself from slumber, laughing at people and machinery who feel like anything they have to say is particularly urgent. On the album’s closer, he spends 10 minutes trying to distill a lifetime of joy and pure pain into a “Goldtone” lasting no more than a split second. In between, Vile’s music is in a wakeful, meditative state, both searching and confident in the manner of a guy who’s learned to trust his life experience rather than someone else’s pat advice. Meanwhile, his blue-collar roots are no longer the stuff of PR one-sheets in “KV Crimes”, acowbell-led parade through the streets of Philadelphia worthy of Rocky and “Snowflakes Are Dancing”, which earns its telltale rhyme of “Springsteen” and “pristine”. It all unfolds at the pace of life itself, a virtuoso work that sounds so effortless that even a supremely chill, modest family man can’t help but testify on "Was All Talk", “making music is easy, watch me!” —Ian Cohen

Acid Rap

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At a passing glance of a Tumblr timeline it'd be easy to mistake Chicago's Chance the Rapper for any number of new jack blog-savvy revivalist rappers struggling their way around high-pitched Pharcyde chatter and "93 Til Infinity" instrumentals. And certainly the production on Acid Rap, with its sampled nods to J Dilla and Tribe Called Quest, leans towards that sort of single-minded throwback. But as a rapper, Chance's nostalgia is immersive, not constructed. It's telling that he openly cites the influence of under-heralded West Coast crew Freestyle Fellowship, a collective that emphasized perpetual stylistic reinvention on a micro level (and provided the big bang for both Pharcyde and Souls of Mischief's elastic flows). So where the A$APs of today pick up hand-me-down and watered down cadences and beat at them repeatedly and the Joey Badasses struggle through existing patterns that are usually far above their competency level, Chance is going back to the point of origin and rebuilding the old styles from scratch. Every track here is kicked in a different cadence—usually jazzy and always frantic—and it's striking to hear that model applied by a young rapper whose raw foundational material is Kanye and Eminem. He's using the same toolbox as the greats but drawing on very different blueprints.

Chance's writing takes a similarly expansive approach to history. For a 20-year-old, Chance's point of view is oddly melancholic and sentimental, but this perspective only strengthens his narratives. He writes with a vivid sensory memory—you can smell the blunt guts or hear the fireworks and mistake them for gunfire in his words. It's a paradoxically level-headed approach on an album where the performance is so unhinged and the second line is "the acid made me crazy." But maybe the title—and Chance's whole Woody Woodpecker meltdown rap style—is a bit of a misdirect. Acid Rap isn't about the trip, it's about the flashbacks. —Andrew Nosnitsky

Psychic

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Psychic is a declaration of psychedelic liberation. It’s the sound of lava lamps being unplugged, black light mushroom posters trashed, and wah-wah pedals pawned. It’s Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave Harrington re-imagining Pink Floyd if Ricardo Villalobos substituted for Syd Barrett. Leave it to a Brown graduate to elude all stoner cliché. Every college freshman to alternate bong rips and guitar riffs has vainly toyed with the conceit of updating Dark Side of the Moon. Most experiments wind up as morbidly embarrassing as Trustafarians with dreads.

Darkside are brazen enough to lay it down flat in the title of their project. The heartbeat thump, lunar spacing, and spooky post-production clatter ring the same alarms. You hear the reverberations of Meddle’s 22-minute trip, “Echoes”, but they’re re-routed through a vapor trail of krautrock, trip-hop, Italo-disco, and minimal techno. If the narcotic canon was constructed for isolated journeys, Psychic is communal, funky and loose, the by-product of ideas emerging from jams. Dave Harrington’s falsetto levitates closer to Off the Wall than another brick in it. Jaar contributes the Gauloises rasp expected from a former scholar of French deconstructionism. His grooves are propulsive and his imagery is spare: paper trails on mountains, fruits on a table, wooden houses to live in, herbal palliatives sempiternal in bloom.

The fear and interior bug-outs are swapped for neon-fringed skylines, meditative clarity, crowded dancefloors and empty freeways. Psychic is as cosmopolitan and refined as its Ivy League pedigree would intimate. It gets sweaty without losing its cool. It envisions an ambulatory future from a waxen past. Now someone needs to figure out what movie it syncs up best with. —Jeff Weiss